Product Description

Remember when cereal boxes came with a free prize inside? You already liked the cereal, but once you saw that there was a free prize inside – something small yet precious – it became irresistible. In his new book, Seth Godin shows how you can make your customers feel that way again. Free Prize Inside is jammed with practical ideas you can use right now to MAKE SOMETHING HAPPEN, no matter what kind of company you work for. Something irresistible. Something that markets itself. Because everything we do is marketing – even if you're not in the marketing department. Here's a step-by-step way to get your organization to do something remarkable: quickly, cheaply and reliably. You don't need an MBA or a huge budget. All you need is a strategy for finding great ideas and convincing others to help you make them happen.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #189722 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Seth Godin has cult-like status in the marketing world and is the author of the international bestseller Permission Marketing and Purple Cow.

Customer Reviews

Some interesting ideas which reflect our sad times
I have an interest in innovation and this little book (183 pages) sounded interesting. I wasn't disappointed. Seth Godin always has something interesting to say.

The "free prize" in the title refers to simple ideas which can differentiate a product from the competition. Note the "simple" - he advises against trying to come up with big ideas which are expensive and usually fail. He continues his attacks on traditional marketing and makes a persuasive argument against it. Instead of spending lots of money on mass marketing, he advocates that you concentrate on creating "remarkable" products. Not remarkable in the sense of being brilliant - simply worth talking about. He prefers "soft" innovation (simple, inexpensive) to "hard" innovation (driven by R&D) and argues that anyone can create soft innovations.

The sad bit is that most of the examples he provides are silly. Not silly in the sense that they won't work - they probably would - but silly in the sense that they don't actually add anything useful to the product/service - they simply make it stand-out from the crowd - which is probably what sells. Sad but true.

A good read and one I learnt from.

Highly Recommended!
If your organization needs to jump-start its creative processes, this accessible book may be helpful. It's broad enough to apply to all industries and has enough examples to provoke some serious thinking. Yet, Seth Godin, also the author of other zippy marketing books, sometimes gets carried away with his own evangelism and coinages (e.g., "edgecraft" for finding innovative product additions at the fringes of your current offerings). Still, Godin's thesis that small improvements and "soft" innovations can reap big benefits rings true, as his many examples make clear. His discussion about why ideas need champions, and how to be one, is also powerful. So if you want your marketing or product development staffers to juice up their creativity, we say this light little book might inspire them to think differently.

Not enough content
Seth Godin has some wonderful ideas, and some wonderful case studies and anecdotes to back them up, but this book could have been half as short and possibly have been more powerful without losing any content at all. The points can become a bit laboured, particularly as many of them seem totally obvious once they've been pointed out. But you're not reading the book for the writing, it's for the marketing concepts and those are absolutely fascinating.